“Well, if you had, you would have noticed the tables.”
“The tables?”
“Indeed. It’s a peculiar thing. Under all those candles and statues and what-have-you, each one is decorated with a lovely yellow table runner.” My heart skipped. I quickened my pace to keep up with Lada, to walk alongside her in this valley of death. Her act of mercy could seem small to you, now that we know the numbers and the magnitude of it all, but it felt infinite then. It blanketed my whole world. “I can’t explain it,” she said, laughing. “They seem to be all the rage.”
* * *
Pauline saw us through the front window. Her nervous jerk of the head indicated we should use the rear entrance. I followed Tarcovich to the back. As she’d predicted, Pauline’s breathing slowed a tad when she noticed me.
“Oh, sweet child,” said Pauline. “I wish my daughter was still your age. Grown up with suitors already. What’s your name, dear?”
“They call me Gamin, madame.”
“Did you pass along the package?” said Tarcovich.
That look of wretched discomfort returned to Pauline’s eyes. “The man at comet twelve took the package.” She wrung her hands. “Comet four was neutralized this morning, so you’ll not stop there.”
“How long do we have?”
“He says you have until half past three before he destroys it.”
“Then we should be on our way.”
As I watched Pauline, I realized I both pitied and respected this woman. Our code words and army euphemisms hung off her like a dress three sizes too large. I have no doubt she prayed each night for a quiet job, a tidy house. But here is what you must understand: when confronted with the naked treachery men could do, Pauline sighed, pursed her lips, and rolled up her sleeves. That is why I have spent this moment with her, you see. Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt stopped the Germans from distributing their Star of David badges to Belgium’s Jews. Pauline did that: Pauline, who worked at a post office in the city, who wished her daughter was young again, who chewed her nails when she was anxious. No one heard her prayers, and thank God for that. She did tremendous things in this world.
* * *
Tarcovich and I proceeded to comet twelve, our code name for a farmhouse east of the FI base. The “man at comet twelve,” a farmer with a nervous tic and two anemic sheep, told us he’d passed along the package to comet three. Tarcovich and I took a cab to a schoolhouse. From the schoolhouse, we drove to a miller’s shop, and from there, we walked to a pub. The barmaid—“the woman at comet sixteen”—instructed us to wait in her cellar. While we stood there breathing in the smell of cheap ale and our nervous sweat, I marveled at this network that Tarcovich had cultivated. It must have taken years to find them all, to feed them the information they needed to do their jobs, to keep them from knowing so much they could compromise the other comets’ identities. And the risk, by God: each “comet” on our trail risked capture, execution, torture, their families ripped apart and sent to the camps. Men of action had always been my heroes. I just never knew who the men of action really were.
The barmaid emerged with a slim packet. Tarcovich took it from her with a nod of thanks.
“Don’t thank me, dear,” said the barmaid. “I don’t know what it is you got in there, but promise me you’ll use it to kick them right in the balls.”
Tarcovich clutched the packet, the photographs of Hitler for Faux Soir, to her heart. “I give you my word.”
10 DAYS TO PRINT
LATE AFTERNOON
The Pyromaniac
I FOUND AUBRION pacing and mumbling in front of a blackboard at the FI base, pausing now and again to scratch out a note. His entire face seemed hazy and still, like a summer night.
Noël came up behind him. “Marc, are you quite all right?”
Aubrion turned. It took a moment for his eyes to focus. “René,” he said, mostly to remind himself who he was talking to. “Oh, I’m fine. Absolutely fine. Just working.”
Noël put up his hands. “All right.” He turned his attention to the blackboard, but quickly looked back to Aubrion when confronted by the chaos of words and arrows.
“I will need to coordinate with Lada and Victor,” said Aubrion, “and perhaps Spiegelman, as soon as possible.”
“No one has seen Spiegelman since last night.”
“He’s probably at the Nazi headquarters.”
“Actually not,” said Spiegelman, and Aubrion and Noël looked up to find him coming downstairs with a mild smile. Victor trailed in behind him.
“Oh, Spiegelman,” Noël said strangely. He had the queasy appearance of a man who’d found himself suddenly forced to make a speech without notes.
Spiegelman took a sheet of paper from his attaché case and placed it on a table, behind a typewriter René Noël had been trying to fix, its insides open and exposed for surgery. All of us were gathered around in the basement, standing apart from each other—silent and tired from our labors. David Spiegelman picked up the paper he’d just put down, regarded it, handed it to Marc Aubrion. I noted how Spiegelman’s shoulders seized up, how he dug his fingernails into his palms.
“It’s the ‘Effective Strategy’ column from Le Soir,” Spiegelman said, for want of something to say, “or rather my version of it.”
Martin Victor stepped forward, his arms folded across his chest. After a moment, he nodded, though I saw no indication that he’d read the paper.
“Are we going to use it?” Tarcovich asked, though I got the sense she was asking something else.
“Why wouldn’t we?” said Aubrion.
“All right, then.” René Noël took the paper from Aubrion’s hands, turning to Spiegelman with a tight-lipped smile. I had a feeling that I was missing something, that a decision had been reached without my knowledge or consent. I believed Aubrion felt the same. “Thank you for your contribution, Monsieur Spiegelman. It’s most appreciated. I must speak to Aubrion about something confidential.”
Spiegelman, who’d quickly learned during his time with the Nazis to detect when he’d been dismissed, took his leave of us. No one spoke in his absence. The pause grew longer and more bizarre.
“Why the devil are you lot acting so strangely?” said Aubrion. “What’s going on?”
Noël placed a hand on Aubrion’s shoulder. “Spiegelman has fulfilled his role here.”
“Of course he has. Why are you acting as though he betrayed us?”
“I received word from our colleagues in France,” said Victor, “that information has been leaving the base.”
Aubrion shook his head. “What are you talking about? What sort of information?”
“Information related to our troop movements.”
“There has been a leak,” said Noël, heavily. “The details aren’t important.”
I saw a convulsion go through Aubrion’s body, as though he were wracked with fever. “I’d say the details are bloody important,” snapped Aubrion.
“We’ve come to a consensus.” Victor had the air of a reluctant executioner. “Spiegelman served a useful purpose, but he is a security risk we cannot continue to allow.”
Aubrion cried, “When did we come to a consensus? You believe Spiegelman is a mole? That makes no sense at all, don’t you see? He would not risk his life to join up with us and then toss his loyalty so casually aside—”
“We talked about it earlier, once I found out about the leak.” Noël shrugged, rubbing at his beard. His eyes were more red than white; the vicious hue had spread like a disease. “He seems the likely culprit, Marc. In truth, I have been uncomfortable with his presence since Wolff’s raid, as have the rest of us. It was good to have him, and you made the right decision in bringing him here. But his time has come.”
“Spiegelman is one of us,” said Aubrion. “He’s a vital part of what we’ve set out to do.”
Noël sho
ok his head, and Aubrion knew there was no convincing him. “Would you do it, Marc?” the director asked. “Would you tell him?”
“When?” said Aubrion. As a very small child, I carried a blanket that I would rub when sad or afraid, until the edges went smooth with my worry. Aubrion’s words took on the texture of that cloth. “Tonight?”
“Tonight,” said Noël.
10 DAYS TO PRINT
EVENING
The Smuggler
THE SOUND OF the stag party reached the whorehouse before the sight of them: the laughter and backslaps of overcompensatory masculinity. Tarcovich looked out the front window. Joseph Beckers was in the back of the group, flanked by a half dozen of his mates on either side. Through a crack in the window, Tarcovich could hear one of them managing to work six euphemisms for male genitalia into a single sentence. Beckers laughed harder than the rest of them; his laugh had a stale and violent quality to it.
As the stag party approached the whorehouse, their unbuttoned collars and bloodshot eyes came into focus. They looked well fed, as few did those days. And they were clods, the lot of them, shoving each other, making rude gestures. The illustrious Beckers, head of the Office of the Post, gestured for one of his mates to knock on the door.
Tarcovich turned to her girls, who were assembled in the foyer. “Remember what I told you. Their cups must be kept full.” The young women nodded. Tarcovich had often watched soldiers from the FI ready themselves for battle; her girls applied lipstick and adjusted their bodices with the same blank-eyed determination. “From the sounds of it, they are drunk already. But that is no reason to clutch your bottles too tightly. Hortense, you know what you must do?”
“Yes, madame,” said Hortense, a girl with thin hair. Though Lada never let customers with heavy fists through the front door, a few slipped past her guard, and it was Hortense who taught the other girls how to cover their bruises with makeup. “I must take Joseph Beckers into the fourth room.”
With a smile, Tarcovich pressed Hortense’s hand. “You’ll do well.”
When the knock finally came, Tarcovich motioned for Hortense to open the door. Laughter and the smell of cheap drink erupted in the foyer. Lada’s girls began taking the men’s arms, putting glasses in their hands. “Who’s the lucky gentleman?” Hortense called over the din. She’d gotten into character splendidly, tossing her hair and letting her corset slip just a tad. The lads shoved Beckers forward.
“I’m the lucky one!” he said. “Did you hear that, boys?” Hortense pulled him toward the staircase. The other girls did the same, leading the men into plush, red rooms.
When the foyer had emptied, Lada sat and drank in the quiet. Someone was giggling in the room above. Smiling at the absurdity of it—zwanze, as Aubrion would have remarked—Lada took a watch from her pocket. It would be fifteen minutes before she went upstairs, she decided, rubbing at a scratch on the watch face. That should be long enough.
Tarcovich knew she should probably feel nervous; if she did not secure the list of newsstands, shops, and the like that sold Le Soir, the whole scheme was lost. “It is important, vitally important,” Aubrion had reminded her before she left, “that we disrupt all the channels they use to distribute Le Soir so that Peter the Happy Citizen can buy Faux Soir instead. Nothing has ever been more important, Lada, I swear it. The real Le Soir cannot hit newsstands at the same time as Faux Soir. If Peter and his mates see both newspapers on display, they will think the Germans are subjecting them to some kind of loyalty test, and they’ll be too spooked to buy Faux Soir.” Tarcovich had rolled her eyes at his insistence—but he was right, and should she fail, even Aubrion would have a devil of a time coming up with another scheme to secure a distribution list. Despite the weight of her task, Tarcovich was not nervous. A frigid calm had inhabited her limbs, as though she were falling in slow motion and there wasn’t much she could do about it.
Tarcovich checked her watch again. A little over fifteen minutes had gone. She stood, her back cracking, and retrieved the flashlight she’d stashed behind a sofa. Clutching it tightly, Tarcovich exited the whorehouse.
She darted around to the back of the building. The wind carried unholy sounds from the open windows above. Trying not to listen, Tarcovich knelt in a patch of flowers behind the whorehouse. She felt around in the damp soil until her fingers brushed a metal handle. With a grunt, Lada tugged.
A trapdoor groaned open, raining dirt and beetles. Tarcovich brushed off her dress and mounted a ladder at the mouth of the door. When she was halfway down, she pulled the door shut.
It had been Aubrion’s idea to turn the sewage system beneath the whorehouse into a tunnel. He’d first mentioned it shortly before the invasion. Tarcovich had scoffed, for this was the stuff of penny dreadfuls; “the escape tunnel,” Aubrion had called it. But a year later, the Nazis arrested a prostitute who’d smuggled a bag of flour into Brussels, later depositing her mangled body in the middle of town. Aubrion and Tarcovich hired some lads from the FI to dig the tunnel, paying them in food and old francs. Three rooms in the whorehouse had a trapdoor hidden beneath a carpet. If needed, Tarcovich could disappear in seconds.
At the bottom of the ladder, Tarcovich switched on the flashlight. The tunnel wound through the underbelly of the building. Here and there, ladders stuttered up the walls. When she reached the fourth ladder, Tarcovich threw aside the flashlight and climbed up.
She pulled open the trapdoor at the top. The heavy door swung downward, hammering into Lada’s elbow. But she did not cry out; she kept her mouth closed until tears stung her eyes.
When the pain subsided, Lada became aware of a wet grunting in the room above. Nausea curdled her stomach. Her ears started to ring, as they often did when she was overwhelmed with feeling—but she pushed it aside, she pushed it all aside, willing herself to concentrate. Lada probed the rug that covered the mouth of the trapdoor. With some effort, she recalled the layout of the room: the rug was located behind the bed, adjacent to a dresser, so Beckers was unlikely to see her. Holding her breath, Tarcovich gathered the dusty fabric in her hands and slid the rug aside.
Lada climbed into the room before she could think about it a moment longer. Her pulse pounded in her injured arm. As she’d thought, Beckers’s view was blocked by the headboard of the bed. She could not see him (or Hortense), so Beckers could not see her. Lada crouched low, trying to think. The horrible sound of this man—Joseph Beckers, head of the Postal Service, a collaborationist brute—threatened to take her. Tarcovich would not let it. She scanned the room.
Beckers’s clothes lay in a pile just out of reach. The list of locations at which Le Soir was distributed would be in a small ledger, Lada guessed—and there it was, sitting atop Joseph Beckers’s trousers: a bashful little book with a leather strap tied around its waist. Lada exhaled sharply. One of the most important bits of intelligence in the country was lying in a man’s undergarments. Good show, Beckers, Lada thought.
She closed her eyes, gathering herself—just for a moment, a heartbeat—and then she lunged for the book and for Beckers’s wallet. Clutching them to her chest, Lada scrambled back through the trapdoor. As she pulled the carpet over the opening, she realized, with some dismay, that she would have to tell Aubrion she’d used his insufferable “escape tunnel” after all.
* * *
When Beckers and his mates passed out from drink, Tarcovich directed her girls to deposit them on the lawn. She waited by the window for them to wake. They did so loudly, protesting their headaches and stomach cramps.
“That bitch,” he said, wobbling to his feet. “That bitch stole my bloody things.”
“I’ll kill her,” said a second. He advanced on the whorehouse with his fists raised. Tarcovich watched him trip a little—not even a real stumble, but a half-committed lurch, like a precocious toddler. “I had fifty francs, by God. I’ll kill that whore.”
“Hang your fifty francs,” said Beckers. �
��Have you any idea what the bloody Germans would do to me if they learned I was here?”
Hortense appeared at Tarcovich’s side. “The wallet was a nice touch,” she murmured. “They will never guess the ledger was your real aim.”
“This was a shoddy idea for a stag party, now, wasn’t it?” said Gert. “Who the bloody hell thought of this in the first place?”
Beckers tilted his head. “I assumed it was you.”
“Me?”
“Took us down to Madame B’s house for Otto’s stag party, you did, so why—”
“I’m married, mate.”
“But you came!”
“Coming and planning are two different things. And in any case—”
“Hang on a tick,” said Beckers. “Who the hell sent those invitations?”
Tarcovich grinned, wishing she could capture this moment for David Spiegelman. The men looked at each other. Suspicion lent their features more complexity than they deserved, Tarcovich thought. One could almost be fooled into thinking they’d half a brain. But they didn’t, of course, which is why the lot of them—Beckers and his dear, loyal mates—spent half the night arguing over why they were there at all.
10 DAYS TO PRINT
NIGHT
The Jester
TO REACH THE Nazi headquarters from the FI base, Spiegelman always took a shortcut through a nameless cemetery at the border of the city. The place was far enough from Enghien that the Germans never patrolled it, and so it became a popular spot for midnight trysts and quiet walks, and for Nazi deserters to contemplate their options. Aubrion had heard stories: young lovers, on the verge of consummating their union, being interrupted by the sound of a bullet, or stumbling across a body in a uniform on their way back into the city. That night, with his head bowed, Aubrion tailed Spiegelman from the FI base until they were surrounded by graves.
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