Liberation

by Imogen Kealey

  2

  Henri Fiocca was watching from the window of his dressing room as Nancy came up the path. He felt his heart lift and the familiar sensations of wonderment, fear and anger. Even on her wedding day she had to head off on some mission. Letters for the Resistance probably, false papers for another refugee desperate to leave France, radio parts for Resistance cells in Marseille itself, Cannes, Toulouse. Nancy was always on a train risking her life to take money and messages to some shadowy friend of a friend. He hated that. The loose, improvised nature of the Resistance network forced her to trust strangers, and these days one couldn’t trust one’s own family. Henri was a patriot—he loathed the Germans with a white-hot rage which equaled Nancy’s, and so he shared his wealth and his table with anyone who could do the enemy harm. But he still wished to God he did not have to share his wife-to-be with them. Nancy seemed to have been born without fear, but Henri knew what fear was. His love for her had taught him that lesson.

  He put his hand on the window pane as she disappeared into the house and said her name under his breath. She had blazed into his life like a meteor, this girl, and scattered light and magic and chaos in equal measure in her wake. He had fallen in love with her at once, absolutely, the first night they met. It had been like stepping off a cliff edge and into the shocking embrace of the ocean, but he was unsure what she wanted from him. He was so much older than her, and his life, for all its luxury, was so dull compared to hers. After a year he discovered she didn’t care about his money. Oh, she enjoyed spending it, just as she enjoyed every fresh pleasure she could find, but she did it with the delight of a child. Slowly, he learned about Nancy’s early miserable years and her flight from Australia to America and London at sixteen; her desperation to put an ocean, half a world, between herself and that unhappy childhood had turned into an animal appetite for pleasure and a fierce self-reliance. After another year, Henri realized that even Nancy needed someone to lean on from time to time and she had chosen him.

  She had chosen him.

  Pride flared in his chest.

  Tonight, he would be able to call her his wife. He knew she wouldn’t stop draining his wealth and running insane risks to help the Resistance just by marrying him—he had no illusions about that—but today and tonight at least, he would know where she was, know she was his own.

  “Perhaps I should talk to Nancy,” a voice behind him said, narrow and nasal. “If she can’t be on time for her hairdresser on her wedding day, maybe she doesn’t even want to get married.”

  Henri looked over his shoulder. His sister was perched on the edge of his bed like an elderly crane. She had been a pretty girl when she was young, even with that long face and thin lips, but somehow even with all her wealth she had managed to turn sour, and that, he believed, had made her ugly. She had insisted on accompanying him upstairs when he’d said he was going to dress, desperate to make one last attempt to get him to call off the wedding.

  “You may try if you wish, Gabrielle. But she will just tell you to go away and leave her alone. And remember she is not constrained by brotherly love. I may not throw you out of the room, but she will.”

  Gabrielle ignored the hint, broad as it was. Her voice continued, high and whining as a mosquito. “I will say this for her, she can curse in French like a sailor in the last hour of his shore leave. Where on earth did she learn such language, Henri? It’s disgusting.”

  Henri smiled. Hearing Nancy let rip in her adopted language was one of the great pleasures of his life.

  “She is a natural linguist, Gabrielle.”

  “Stuff! No dowry! She refuses to become a Catholic! Does she even believe in God?”

  “I doubt it.”

  The whine pitched a little higher. “How could you, Henri, how could you pollute our family with this foul little Australian whore?”

  That was too far; even brotherly love had its limits. Henri lifted his sister by her shoulders off his bed and propelled her firmly toward the door.

  “Gabrielle, speak to me of my wife in that manner once more, and you will not set foot in my house again. If I had to trade my money, my business, my dear family for an hour of Nancy’s company in the lowest bar in Montmartre I would do it without a moment’s hesitation. Now get out.”

  Gabrielle realized that she had gone too far and her tone became beseeching. “I am thinking only of you, Henri,” she managed as he shut the door in her face.

  Thank God she does not know about Nancy’s work for the Resistance, Henri thought. She would go tip-tapping her way to the Gestapo in an instant, a mix of hatred of Nancy and greed for the reward making her eager to bloody her claws.

  He returned to the mirror and smoothed down his hair. His friends told him he was looking younger since the war had begun. He didn’t want to tell them it was just that they were aging at a faster rate. He didn’t want to offend them, loyal as they were in their way to their own wives, by pointing out that Nancy, a teenaged runaway from the other side of the world, had given him purpose and hope while they staggered with shock at the defeat of France, the flight of the British soldiers from Dunkirk and then the horrific bombing of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir on the coast of French Algeria, ordered by none other than Churchill himself. Over a thousand Frenchmen killed by British bombs. That had shaken his country-men, and so many had retreated into their homes in the face of it that the Germans now thought that they owned the whole country. They did not. France would rise in the end. Nancy made him believe that. What would life without her have been like? He shivered. Hellish, gray.

  And then of course Nancy also seemed to be best friends with every black-market operator on the Riviera. Their table was always laden with fresh meat, and so they shared with their friends who had neither connections nor money. Henri did not think he’d eaten a meal alone with Nancy in their home for a year.

  He heard a tap at the door.

  “What?” he said gruffly, thinking his sister might have gathered her courage for one last assault.

  Nancy slid in like a cat. She could only have been in the house for ten minutes, yet there she was, her hair curled and piled high to frame her heart-shaped face, her full lips cherry red against her white powdered skin, her blue dress sweeping and skimming over the full curves of her breasts and hips.

  “Is that how you’ll greet me every time I knock on your dressing-room door from now on, Henri?”

  He walked toward her, a glimmer in his eyes, but she held up her hand.

  “Don’t disarrange me, you monster! I just wanted you to know I’m all ready to be made an honest woman, if Gabrielle didn’t put you off.” She winked. “Though I just spotted her sniffing into her hanky in the hall downstairs, so I guess she failed.”

  He put his hands on her hips, feeling the blue silk of her dress move over her skin, but did not try to kiss her.

  “How could you go out today, Nancy? In the middle of all this hell. On our wedding day?”

  She put her hand up to his cheek. “I’m sorry, but don’t growl at me, Old Bear. It was important, to me at least. I’m home now.”

  “Have you seen the new posters, offering one hundred thousand for the White Mouse? It seems your stunt breaking out the prisoners from Puget has not gone unnoticed.”

  “Worth it,” she said, gently removing his hands from her hips before his grip did damage to the delicate—and extremely expensive—silk. “Those men can do something now. Though that British airman was an arse. Complaining about his food and how cramped the safe house was like we hadn’t all just risked a firing squad to save his sorry butt.”

  Henri took a step away from her. Gabrielle was always talking about the other women he could have chosen to be his wife, beautiful, elegant, obedient, French girls. They would have kept careful accounts, stayed quietly at home. But every other woman in the world disappeared when he thought of Nancy. The fire of her, her brutal tongue. The refusal to be cowed. She went up against the world toe-to-toe like a prize fighter. The clash of images in hi
s mind, the bruised hulk of a boxer, and this beautiful young woman in blue silk and red lipstick made him laugh and she looked at him quizzically.

  “White Mouse is a bad name for you, Nancy. You are a lion. Now, shall we marry?”

  He shrugged on his dinner jacket, and she came close to him again to adjust his tie. He caught the scent of Chanel on her warm skin.

  “Yes, Monsieur Fiocca. We shall.”

  The party at the Hotel du Louvre et Paix was a complete triumph. Not even the sour stares of Henri’s family could chip away at the perfectly joyous victory of the thing. If anyone wondered how the new Madame Fiocca had managed to get her hands on such a profusion of luxuries, they kept their doubts to themselves and launched themselves headlong into the serious business of pleasure.

  Nancy was fiercely happy. She knew that the party would be the talk of the city and that she had done Henry proud. Every hour spent debating and arguing with chefs, florists and dressmakers had been worth it. Take that, Marseille. She slipped her hand into his under the table at the head of the gilded ballroom. He was turned away from her, trading jokes with one of his managers at the shipworks, but he squeezed the tips of her fingers and rubbed the inside of her palm with his thumb in a way that made her shiver.

  “Madame Fiocca,” said a voice at her elbow. It was Bernard, maître d’ of the hotel and one of Nancy’s favorite friends. He stepped back to allow one of his underlings to set the silver ice bucket at her elbow and fresh glasses in front of Nancy and Henri, then lifted the chilled bottle out of the ice, showed it to her, and at her nod opened it. It sighed open under his practiced hand and he poured for them both.

  Henri turned from his friend, saw the label and vintage, and laughed out loud. “How did you manage this, Nancy?”

  “I told you I was on a very important mission today, Old Bear.”

  He shook his head, but took his glass from Bernard with a reluctant smile on his lips.

  She got to her feet and tapped her full glass with a fork. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Gabrielle, sitting with her equally unfriendly father, Claude, stiffen. A bride giving a toast at the wedding? Shocking! Hell yes, Nancy was going to give a toast.

  She waved her hands in the air. “Quiet now, you devils!”

  The band leader cut off his musicians in full flight and Nancy’s friends silenced each other in a chorus of shushes and giggles. Nancy lifted her glass.

  “Thank you! Now, my father couldn’t be here today, but he sends his regards from Sydney.” Nancy was guessing on that one. She hadn’t seen him since she was five. “And my mother wasn’t invited, which if you knew her, you’d realize was my present to all of you.” That mean cramped woman in her mean cramped house, a Bible in one hand and her stick in the other. Let her rot. “So I shall try and give a proper toast of my own. I am toasting my husband this evening”—she paused for cheers and whistles—“with a 1928 Krug, because that was the vintage he ordered the night we met, when France was still free. But war or not, Nazis in our streets or not, I say to you this evening, while we are free in our hearts, France is still free. Henri, I know I am a difficult, expensive, troublesome sort of wife to have, but you are my rock and together we will build a life worthy of this vintage. I swear it.”

  Henri got to his feet and touched his glass to hers and for a moment, as their eyes met, they were the only people in the world.

  “Madame Fiocca,” Henri said, and sipped his champagne.

  Someone in the crowd sighed loudly and even Nancy felt the prick of sentimental tears behind her eyes. No. Tonight was a party.

  “To hell with propriety,” she said, and drained her glass, then turned and gave her audience her best, her widest, her most impossible-to-resist smile.

  They cheered, a full-throated roar of delight and defiance. The band leader caught his cue and launched into a fast-paced version of “When the Saints go Marching In.” The waiters began to clear tables and move them out of the way for the dancing to begin, helped with stumbling enthusiasm by Nancy’s most disreputable friends.

  Henri set his glass on the table and kissed her. Out of the corner of her eye Nancy noticed Gabrielle dabbing at her eyes with a linen handkerchief, and so she kissed him back, hard, and tipped herself forward into his arms like a swooning Hollywood star. The applause and whoops were loud enough to be heard up and down the seafront.

  3

  It was another hour before Nancy had the chance to talk to Philippe and Antoine about what she had seen during the destruction of the Old Quarter.

  Antoine, dark-haired and thin but with a wiry strength in his narrow shoulders, was one of the most successful people smugglers in the south. He’d worked with Nancy, a Scotsman named Garrow she had never met and a Belgian Resistance man called O’Leary, all of them guiding escapees to isolated safe houses and arranging guides to take them over the Pyrenees into the relative safety of Spain a dozen times. Philippe, shorter in stature with a square, tanned face, who always looked like he’d just come in from the field even when he was dressed in a dinner jacket, was an excellent forger. Near faultless passes, residence cards and travel permits emerged from his basement workshop day after day and carried those lucky enough to find friends in the Resistance along the winding train tracks and on rural busses into anonymous obscurity, or from safe house to safe house across France until they found their way onto a ship for England.

  “They just shot him dead,” Nancy said. “Right in the middle of the fucking street. There’s not even a pretense of legality anymore.” The image of the fatal shot, the spurt of brain matter and blood flickered behind her eyes and she downed the rest of her glass. Close behind them a champagne cork popped noisily and Antoine stiffened, then shrugged.

  They are too worn out even to be angry any more, Nancy thought, and held out her glass. I must hang on to my rage.

  A passing waiter saw her and she heard the champagne fizz into the glass. It sounded like the hiss of her own blood in her ears when she thought of that dead boy. Gray. Red. Yellow. The blue of the sky. She would feel every second of it.

  “I’m worried,” Antoine said. “Three times last month my guides had to turn back because of increased patrols, just when we had people to move. Perhaps we should go dark. Suspend operations, slow down for a while. Someone is talking. Or someone is being careless.”

  Nancy felt his gaze. “Don’t look at me! I don’t even tell you where those steaks you eat at my table come from. I am the soul of discretion.” She winked at him over the rim of her glass.

  “Antoine has a point though,” Philippe said gruffly, his large hands holding his champagne flute as if he thought it might explode between his fingers any moment. “Nancy, there is a new Gestapo spy hunter in Marseille. A man named Böhm. He destroyed the best network we had in Paris in a matter of weeks. Hardly anyone made it out. He did time in the east too and now he is here. He is coming for the White Mouse. For you. We must be careful.”

  Careful. Everyone wanted Nancy to be careful, polite, sit on the edge of her chair with her knees together and her hands in her lap and never look anyone in the eye. Fuck that.

  “Oh, relax, boys. He’s not going to find me. Everyone knows I’m just a girl with expensive habits and a rich husband. Who is going to see the White Mouse when they see Madame Fiocca out shopping?”

  “Nancy, take this seriously,” Antoine said. “We are not playing a game. And even if the Gestapo don’t suspect you, what about the men in your life? You think that Henri can keep funneling half his fortune into our cause without attracting notice?”

  That stung. But Henri was a grown man and could make his own decisions, she told herself. Yes, he kept warning her to be careful too and she kept pushing and pushing but…

  “The only way to beat a bully is to punch him in the nose,” she said. “Anyone who’s ever been in a schoolyard knows that,” she added, a sullen and dangerous flicker in her eye. She felt a touch on her shoulder and turned. Her husband. How did he manage to look so cool, so
calm after the fountains of champagne they had drunk? Every other man in the room looked flushed and awkward next to him. Her anger was forced out of her by a sudden surge of pride.

  “Nancy! You promised me! No talk of your work today.” He looked at Philippe and Antoine. They shuffled like schoolboys.

  “We have been urging Nancy to be cautious, Monsieur Fiocca,” Antoine said.

  Henri smiled at them. “Good luck, I hope you have more success than I. Darling, shall we dance?”

  Nancy took his hand, then waved at Antoine and Philippe over her shoulder. Caution be damned. Henri was a hero and could look after himself, and she was never going to slow down if she had the chance to bloody the Nazis’ noses just one more time.

  Their guests moved aside to give the newly-weds room to dance a waltz. Henri was a divine dancer. Nancy could just let go, allowing herself to be guided by him over the polished wood floors. She leaned back against his encircling arm; it was like flying. When she opened her eyes, he was gazing at her steadily, but in a way that put her on her guard.

  “Are you going to scold me?”

  His hand tightened slightly round her waist. “I think I must. Spending your wedding reception with members of the Resistance. Risking your life for a bottle of Krug.”

  She widened her eyes. They were still on the edge of playing, of finding it all terribly amusing: the war, the danger, him as sage and wise husband shaking his head over the excesses of his young wife. “They are my friends, and I got the Krug for you, my darling.”

  “I don’t need champagne, Nancy.” He wasn’t playing any more. “I need you.”

  He brought her closer to him. A hiss outside, like the first hint of the summer mistral wind, and then a dull cramping explosion. The chandeliers shook and a thin shiver of plaster dust whispered from the ceiling.