“Yes,” Charlotte said without hesitation. Lucien’s expression was concerned, and Charlotte knew he was already regretting asking. But helping out on the line would give Ruby a reason to get out of bed each day.
“Are you sure? This could be more dangerous than last time. The Nazis are cracking down.”
“It’s a risk I’m willing to take. And I know Ruby will feel the same way.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
January 1944
There were fifteen other pilots—most American, a few British—along for the journey west to Saint-Brieuc, a commune in Brittany situated on a bay that opened into the English Channel. As had been the case on his last journey out of Paris, Thomas was given a fake ID and a forged Ausweis travel permit as well as a change of clothes to make him look like a poor French farmworker. Giving up the garments he’d worn at Ruby’s was more wrenching than he’d expected; handing them over felt like giving away his last piece of her. But he was doing that anyhow by fleeing Paris, wasn’t he?
The men were divided randomly into groups of two or three and instructed not to speak with one another. They traveled separately to the Gare Montparnasse, not far from Ruby’s old apartment, and were warned to avoid eye contact, to stay silent, and to pretend to be asleep if officials passed through their compartment. The 250-mile journey through the French countryside was uneventful, and several hours later, all sixteen men exited the train and were met by couriers. Some of the pilots were lodged in Saint-Brieuc, but some, including Thomas, were sent on via a small local train to Plouha, an even smaller town just up the coast. Thomas found himself with two American pilots in the tiny attic of a farmhouse a mile inland.
Storms pounded Brittany for a week, and Thomas spent many hours sitting silently at the small attic window, which happened to look east to Paris, wondering about Ruby. Was she safe? Did she miss him? Had she meant the things she’d said about the future they’d share after the war? Each day, he made small talk with the other pilots and with their hosts; he was the only one among the refugees who spoke French, so he slipped once again into the role of translator. Each night, he lay awake, staring at the low-beamed ceiling as wind whistled by the house, and thought about Ruby’s field of poppies.
They’d been in the cottage for nearly two weeks when their hostess, a young woman named Marie, climbed into the attic late one afternoon and said in English, “It is time.” She turned to Thomas and, asking him to translate, quickly relayed the plan. They’d wait for full dark, then she’d take the pilots to another safe house. Later in the evening, they would be led down a steep cliff to a cove tucked against the rocks. From there, they’d be picked up by small British boats to take them across the Channel. “Godspeed,” Marie concluded in English, making eye contact with each of the men in turn.
An hour later, she brought them through the darkness across muddy fields and country lanes to a small cottage that overlooked the moonlit water. There were six pilots there already, and the others who had been on the train from Paris arrived shortly thereafter. They were joined by a Russian and two Frenchmen, all of whom were running from the Germans and would make the journey with them. The man who had interrogated Thomas in the bistro in Paris—who had introduced himself as Captain Hamilton—arrived just past ten-thirty to explain the plan. By morning, he said, if all went well, the men would be back home. “I’ll need your IDs and anything personal that could identify you,” he concluded.
Thomas lined up with the others to hand over the last of his effects, and then he waited. When Hamilton was done collecting everything, he went on to explain in a clipped tone exactly what would happen next. There would be six guides to lead the men to the cliff Marie had mentioned, and then they’d have to proceed, one by one, down the hundred-foot drop to the beach while making as little sound as possible.
“On the way there, we have to cross through fields patrolled regularly by the enemy,” he added. “Be prepared to fight them off if it comes to that. We can’t compromise the mission.”
Just before midnight, they made their way across the road and into a field filled with thorny bushes. The men had been told to remain completely quiet and to hold hands, forming a silent human chain. They broke apart as they reached the cliff, and for a moment, standing on the edge of France, Thomas felt nauseated as he looked down into the blackness. The surf crashed below, loud and hungry, frothy white waves glowing in the moonlight. It was a long way down, and once he’d made the plunge, there would be no going back.
The man in front of Thomas stepped to the edge of the cliff and disappeared in a rumble of falling rocks. Then it was Thomas’s turn. The man behind him nudged him forward and Thomas took a deep breath. This was it. He closed his eyes, and as Captain Hamilton had instructed, he lay on his back, extended his legs with his feet flexed, and pushed off. His body slammed down the cliff, and as rocks ripped through his clothes and tore his skin, he held a fist in his mouth to keep from crying out. He hit the beach with a thud, and with an aching back, he stood and moved into the shadows. Reid, one of the Americans who’d been sheltered with him at Marie’s house, put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed once, a reassurance.
Once they were all huddled in the hollow by the sea, there was nothing to do but wait. Captain Hamilton had been vague about the events that were meant to unfold, but Thomas had assumed there would be boats along to retrieve them shortly. Instead, the moon ascended higher and the tide continued to rise. One of the guides flashed a Morse code signal into the blackness at one-minute intervals, indicating that they were ready for pickup, but no one came, and Thomas began to worry that something had gone wrong. In the distance to the west, the pillboxes of the Pointe de la Tour, a coastal guard post manned by the Germans, were just visible against the night sky. Thomas began to wonder about the logic of this plan.
But then, after they’d waited for more than two hours, three pale dots appeared on the horizon, moving toward them at a rapid clip. As they drew closer, Thomas realized they were wooden surfboats, each manned by three fellows with oars. As they slid silently into the cove, the men aboard the boats exchanged greetings with Captain Hamilton and the guides, and they put away the submachine guns they were carrying. Quickly, they unloaded a large gasoline tank and six suitcases. “Now,” Hamilton whispered to the airmen, gesturing for the one closest to the water to come forward. Quickly, the escapees boarded the boats, and by the time Thomas turned back around to watch the beach slip away, Hamilton and the others were gone, as if they’d simply melted into the night.
Soon, they were approaching a wooden-hulled motor gunboat, an MGB, that seemed to materialize out of nowhere. Quickly, the men were pulled aboard and escorted belowdecks, and the surfboats were secured. A single engine purred to life, and they headed north, toward England, the cliffs of France vanishing into the blackness behind them.
The small cabin exploded in a cacophony of voices as soon as the last man descended. There were cheers, expressions of disbelief, jolly complaints about the gashes many of them had sustained on their backs and legs from sliding down the cliff to the beach. But Thomas stayed silent; he knew he should have felt overjoyed to be heading home, but all he could think was that with each passing moment, he was farther and farther away from France, farther away from Ruby, farther away from the future he so badly wanted. He knew he didn’t have a choice, that the only way back to Ruby was to return to England and rejoin the war, but right now, it felt like he was making the biggest mistake of his life.
Six hours later, as they pulled into Dartmouth Harbor, the rest of the pilots filed toward the front of the boat to watch as they approached land. Only Thomas turned the other way, looking southeast toward the country that was no longer visible across the Channel. “I’ll come back for you,” he whispered into the morning mist. “I promise.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
February 1944
The days without Thomas felt empty at first, but within a week, after several interviews with stern-faced MI9 men, Ruby
began to host pilots once again. The new work kept her occupied and prevented her from dwelling on all the terrible things that could have befallen the man she loved. She cried herself to sleep, but during the day, she put on a cheerful face for Charlotte and Lucien. In the mornings, she pretended not to see the concerned glances of pilots who, hidden in the wall overnight, must have heard her sobs.
The changes in Paris as the winter dragged on were unmistakable. The impeccably dressed Nazi soldiers and ingratiatingly polite officers were beginning to disappear, replaced by scruffy, ill-mannered German troops. “They’re sending the decent ones to the front now,” Lucien commented one day. “It’s a good sign. It means the Allies are winning the war, you see. They need all the best men to fight.”
And while Ruby believed Lucien, the presence of the less civilized soldiers also made things more difficult. The Germans grew crueler and more violent in their reprisals. More and more frequently, French people were picked up on suspicion of being part of the Resistance and were shot to death within hours, without any sort of due process. The Germans were nervous, Lucien said, because they were slowly losing their hold on France. But all Ruby could see was that they were tightening their grip.
On the first Tuesday in February, she stepped out into the frigid cold to queue, as she always did, for her rations. She was armed with her own tickets plus some of Lucien’s forgeries, the only way she could provide enough food for Charlotte and the pilots. It was risky to use the fake ones, of course, but it was a necessity she had grown accustomed to.
There was something different about this day, though, something ominous, and Ruby sensed it moments after she’d taken her place in the line. As the women around her rubbed their hands together, trying to get warm, and breathed out puffs of air, two German soldiers approached from the rear and two from the front. The mundane chatter—about the icy weather, about naughty children, about the punishing shortages of coal—died out as the Germans began walking the length of the line, looking at each woman’s face. Ruby held her breath and studied the ground with great interest. What if they were here for her? What if her work on the line had finally caught up to her?
One of the Germans stopped in front of her and reached out to tilt her chin up. His leather glove felt oddly warm against her chilled skin as he turned her head from side to side, as if he was inspecting cattle. He had beady blue eyes, bushy black eyebrows, a mouth that looked too small for his face. “You,” he said in deeply accented French. “Your identity card.”
Ruby could feel the eyes of the other women on her, and for a moment, she was frozen.
“Schneller!” the German shouted after only a few seconds.
Ruby fumbled in her handbag and withdrew her card, the real one that identified her as Ruby Benoit. The German stared at it for a moment and then looked up at her with narrowed eyes. “Do not move.”
He took a few steps to where the other Germans were standing, and as they conferred in hushed tones, examining her papers, she could feel her knees quaking. The others in line had scooted away from her, as if whatever was happening to her was contagious. A few left the line altogether, disappearing down alleys when the Germans’ backs were turned.
Finally, the beady-eyed German returned and thrust her papers at her. “What is your business here?”
“Queuing for barley flour,” she managed.
“Do you know Adèle Beauvais?”
The name didn’t ring a bell at all. Was it someone attached to the escape line, or was this purely a case of mistaken identity? “N-no.”
“She is not your sister?”
“No. I’ve never heard of her. I swear.”
He grabbed her chin again and held it firmly as he looked into her eyes. She refused to blink, to show him any weakness.
“Very well,” he said at last. He turned and barked something at the other Germans, and then he turned back to her. “If I find that you are lying, I will happily shoot you in the head myself.”
And then he turned sharply on his heel, followed by the other three. They got into a car a half block away, and then they were gone. Ruby collapsed to the sidewalk, breathing hard. Only one of the other women in line, a woman old enough to be Ruby’s mother, came to her aid.
“Perhaps if you know this Adèle Beauvais, you should tell her to get out while she still can,” the woman said as she helped Ruby up.
“But I’ve never heard of her.”
“Dear,” the woman said gently, “I can read on your face that you are not as innocent as you would have the Germans believe.”
Ruby opened her mouth to deny it, but then the woman pressed a package into her hand. “Here. My eggs and meat. Go home now before the day gets any worse for you. That was a narrow escape.”
“But—”
“Take it. And if you’re doing something to undermine the Germans,” she added in a whisper, “then thank you. Vive la France.” She turned her back on Ruby, pulling her wool coat more tightly around her. Finally, Ruby stepped out of line and began the walk back to her apartment, haunted by the fate that could have found her by accident.
“PERHAPS WE SHOULD STOP,” RUBY said that night as she and Charlotte ate dinner alone in the kitchen. They were between pilots, and Lucien was out at a meeting, so it was just the two of them. Ruby had told her what had happened that day and how much it had shaken her. “Things are getting more dangerous.”
“But if we stop fighting, we’ve already begun to lose. We have to keep at it until the very end.”
“Yes, I know. But today terrified me, Charlotte. The next time the Germans come, it could be for us. Your parents didn’t leave you with me thinking that I would insert you into the fight for France.”
“You didn’t insert me anywhere. With or without you, I would have found my way into the Resistance. Anyhow, my parents couldn’t have imagined how the world would change. My father left our apartment a year and a half ago thinking that the police would let him go because it was the right thing to do. He didn’t get to stay here long enough to change his mind. But he would have, Ruby. He would have seen the need to fight back. He just didn’t realize yet what would happen to the city he loved.”
“But the risk—” Ruby began.
“The risk is part of it,” Charlotte said firmly. “Nothing great happens without risk.”
“I know. I just can’t help feeling as if our luck is running out.”
Over the next several weeks, the arrivals and departures of pilots flowed like a steady tide. There were Refilwe and Poloko, two pilots from South Africa who arrived together, conspicuous in both their accents and their appearances. They were two of the most polite pilots Ruby took in, but she was glad when they departed after only two days, for they would have been harder to pass off as Frenchmen if the authorities came looking. There was a pilot named Travis from New Zealand, whose charming accent made Charlotte giggle, and there was a pilot named Raymond from Worthington, Ohio, whose sister had gone to university in New York at the same time Ruby had. Howie from Topeka was with them for almost a week, and he spent evenings patiently helping Charlotte practice her English verb conjugations and mornings sipping watery ersatz coffee with Ruby in companionable silence. Terence from Liverpool was worried about whether his fiancée, Elizabeth, would stay faithful to him when he was gone. “She has legs that go on for miles,” he said more than once, “and don’t think that the other men don’t notice. She’s always flirting, but she swears she loves me. Do you think she’s telling the truth?”
Marcus from Arlington, Texas, was disturbed that Ruby and Charlotte were involved in the escape line. “But you’re women,” he said, looking baffled. “This is dangerous work, which means it should be done by men.” Still, he thanked them profusely for their hospitality and was never rude, but Ruby was happy to see him go when Laure—whom they had recruited for the new escape line—came to pick him up. Ernest from Spring Gully, South Carolina, had such a thick southern accent that Ruby could hardly understand him, and Joseph
from Brockton, Massachusetts, came down with a fever and murmured for two days straight about someone named Catherine, whom he called the love of his life. Fortunately, he came out of the fog on the third day and was in traveling shape by the fourth, having sweated out the illness under Ruby’s concerned supervision.
All the pilots brought welcome news of Allied victories and spoke of the hope that the war would be over soon. The Germans were being pushed back on every front. “France will be liberated any day now,” a pilot from St. Louis named Tom Trouba told Ruby confidently in late February. “You wait and see. The war’ll be over by the end of ’forty-four.”
He departed with Laure the next day, leaving Charlotte and Ruby alone once again. Charlotte went out in the late morning to meet Lucien, and after Ruby returned from exchanging the day’s ration tickets, she sat down in the living room, basking in the rare silence. She hadn’t been feeling well for the past few weeks, which she attributed to the doldrums of winter and the constant pit of worry in her stomach over Thomas’s safety. But today, alone for the first time in weeks, she had time to truly think about how she’d been feeling and when the symptoms had first appeared. As she sat on the couch in silence, her stomach swimming, something suddenly occurred to her: she hadn’t had her time of the month since December. More than two months ago. “Oh my God,” she said aloud.
And all at once, she knew. The pit in her stomach. The lack of appetite even when she should have been starving. The swelling in her breasts even as her belly grew flatter. It was exactly what had happened last time.
She was pregnant. The realization hit her like a lightning bolt, and she didn’t know whether to be ecstatic or terrified. It was what she and Thomas had spoken of, the life they had planned together, but she wasn’t ready for the future to come yet. At the same time, though, what if the pilots were right and the war would be over soon?
The Room on Rue Amélie Page 24